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Monday, February 4, 2013

Thanks to more than a million generous donations, our annual
fundraiser was over in record time. We said thank you on Wikipedia at
the end of 2012. In case you missed that, we're saying it again here.
Your
donation makes it possible for the Wikimedia Foundation to provide
thousands of volunteer editors with the tools and infrastructure they
need to keep Wikipedia going -- software developers, a data center fit
to serve the world's fifth most popular site, support programs around
the world and more.
Have you ever wondered who wrote the
millions of articles on Wikipedia? This year we made a video to
introduce you to just a few of them. If you have a few minutes, please
watch:http://youtu.be/3Knv6D6Thi0
(Note: Video hosted by YouTube, not Wikimedia, and is subject to YouTube's terms of use and privacy policy.)
We
also convinced a pair of independent filmmakers to donate this clip
from their upcoming documentary film showing a remote village in Peru
where children learn to edit Wikipedia and add an article about their
own community:http://youtu.be/1XPnH_rF9ks
(Also hosted by YouTube)
The
2012 fundraiser was our shortest and most successful ever. Thanks to
our readers, we've been able to spend less time asking for donations
each year even as rising readership and new challenges -- such as the
rise of mobile -- increase our expenses.
In 2013 we're
going to experiment with a significant change in the way we fundraise.
We're going to try showing our readers fundraising messages one or a few
times outside of our annual fundraiser. This will allow us to receive
donations from a broader population of readers (rather than only those
who happen to visit during the end-of-year fundraising days) while
showing far fewer messages to users overall. We're not sure how this
will work. Please let us know if you feel you are seeing our fundraising
messages repeatedly before December. Our goal is to show our readers as
few fundraising messages as possible, but for everyone to see them at
least once.
If you have any feedback -- positive or negative -- about our fundraiser please reply to this email or send a message to: donate@wikimedia.org
Once
again, thank you from the bottom of our hearts for supporting what we
believe is the most important and beautiful site on the web, and a
community of volunteers who we love and respect.
Sincerely,
The Wikimedia Fundraising Team